Lesson: Customer Understanding with Steve Blank

Step #10 Clone Market: Customers are possibly known in a clone market

A clone market, the customers are possibly known because you’re going to copy an existing market like the United States, but the customer needs and why it's a clone, is you're going to actually localize all those specific issues for your country or region. There are no competitors if you're first and the risk is misjudging the local needs. A great example is Baidu.

So let's take a look at the last type of market, it’s the clone market. This takes foreign business models and adopts it to local conditions. What’s a foreign business model? Typically right now a foreign business model is one that's occurring in the US. What's a local condition? Well if your language is different than English or your culture is different other than US or if your country has import restrictions, or local control and ownership and you have a market large enough to support a business model, typically countries with north of a hundred million people that fit this criteria might be China, India, Russia, Brazil, even the EU itself, just cloning US business models that exists is not a bad business strategy.